


Arttober Prompts

by Baphometryoshka



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, October Prompt Challenge, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Other, Short Story Anthology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:27:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26803609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baphometryoshka/pseuds/Baphometryoshka
Summary: Very very short works for the Arttober prompt list by a friend!
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	1. Nekomimi/animal ears

Sabiné couldn't believe this was real. What was this, an anime?

She stood there in front of the mirror, struck dumb by what she was seeing. After a minute of stillness, she nervously began to reach her hand upwards, watching her reflection carefully as she got closer and closer to the crown of her head. She paused, blinking to made sure this was really and truly happening, and then resumed to cautiously sweep a few strands of hair to the side. 

Sabiné took a deep breath, her hand still in her hair. As plain as the nose on her face, so too were the two upright, triangular, fuzzy ears on her head. The morning sun shone through the window behind her, framing her face with a bright glow, and illuminating the new additions to her anatomy. The tiny capillaries in her ears made visible in the light, Sabiné lowered her hand, squeezed her eyes tight, and waited. When she opened them, everything would surely be normal. She had just not woken up yet, and was having the dumbest dream. Maybe it symbolized something, and she'd have to look it up later. Maybe she'd been on the internet too late last night, and some stupid meme had worked its way into her subconscious. Both were extremely plausible explanations for this, she just had to wake up. Sabiné opened her eyes. 

She looked into her own eyes, reflected in the mirror. The mirror, she was still standing in front of. Her eyes shot up to check for the absence of ears, but had no such luck. There they were. Two symmetrical cat-like ears. On her head. 

Stranger even, with her surprise replaced by worry, the previously erect ears betrayed her emotion as they slightly flattened and turned outward. Both hands came up around them, and Sabiné let out a small yelp of astonishment. She had actually FELT that, as if she were putting her hands over her own ears. Frantically, she took her hands from the cat ears and pulled them down to where she remembered her ears had been. Her eyes widened in horror as she touched just skin and hair, pulling her hair back as she searched for her ears in the mirror. Sabiné was shaking, and breathing like a racehorse. 

Still trying to process the situation, Sabiné's breathing quickened even more, her heart hammering against her ribs. Taking a step back, she yanked her nightstand drawer open and retrieved a small bottle of pills. Struggling, she opened it and threw one in her mouth, reaching for the water bottle on the nightstand. With a flip and a gulp, she took the pill, and slumped against the side of her bed.

Her breathing slowed, and her heart began to pump normally again. Sabiné sighed, she hadn't had a panic attack like that in months. Still on the floor, she looked back at her reflection in the mirror. A large puff of dust, most likely stirred up from the drawer being opened so frantically, floated down to rest on the tip of her right ear. She watched in amazement as, instinctively, the ear simply twitched.


	2. Candlelight/Lantern, Mushrooms/Fungus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompts 3 and 4!

The sun had already set behind the trees before Sabiné set out on her collection journey, with the air still warm and thick from the heat of the day. No moon offered her light as she stood outside her teacher's empty cabin. She held her basket with her teeth while she struggled with the lantern and matchbox in her hands. Fumbling, she put down the lantern to properly take a match from the box. Now with both hands free, she struck it, and squat down to open the lantern's tiny door. She touched the flame to the wick and swore sharply as the match burned down to her finger. 

"FUCK!" 

Quickly, she closed the lantern door, stood up, and stubbed out the match flung on the ground seconds ago. She held the lantern up to her finger to see the damage: nothing visible, but it still HURT.

Sabiné, still grimacing, turned the lantern toward the forest before her, a dark tangle of pine needles that seemed to blend into itself as she looked further in. The residual heat seemed to emanate from the trees like breath from the maw of a great beast. With her free hand, Sabiné pulled on her shirt a few times for air flow, and rolled her shoulders. 

"I'm already sweaty..."

And there she went, boots plodded into the darkness as the lantern cut a circle of light. Everything was quiet, save for the occasional chirp of a cricket, and the soft crunch of leaf litter at each step. Sabiné scanned the illuminated ground for any trace of her required gatherings, but her teacher had given her but a few scant details on what they wanted. Their words floated back to her:

"You're looking for a light brown fungus that grows around tree trunks, but only pick the ones smaller than your thumb."

The old mage had been in a hurry that morning, and these instructions were shouted from the door frame, but they had always explicitly mentioned only gathering at night. Sabiné repeated the instructions to herself in paraphrased pieces as she approached a large conifer, with a trunk almost as wide as her. Holding the lantern at arms length, she felt a whip of excitement as she spotted a fungus in front of her boot. She traced the pattern of wide plates with her eyes, the colony spiraling its way up the tree trunk and into the branches above, further than her sphere of light could penetrate. Sabiné reached out and picked one of the flat fungal plates and held it up to the light. She frowned, as she realized that she couldn't tell exactly HOW dark this shade of brown was. In fact, as she turned it over in her hand, she really wasn't sure if it WAS a shade of brown. The warm yellow-orange of the lantern light was not making this easy. Sabiné gently but repeatedly squeezed the plate with her forefinger and thumb as she considered her options.

"i COULD fill my basket here without even having to look further...BUT, this might not even be the right kind..."

She tossed the plate into her basket, and plucked another from the tree.

"I'll just grab a couple here, and see if any other trees have something similar."

Making sure to measure each against her thumb, she plucked six more pieces of fungus and walked on past the conifer as the night swallowed it behind her.

"Process of elimination, simple."

At least, Sabiné hoped it would be simple. She knew the forest well, and had been down the deer paths and along the creeks and streams many times before. She knew how to read the forest in the day, but in the moonless night? She assured and reassured herself that it was no different. 

"A room is still a room, even if the lights are off."

As Sabiné maneuvered over a fallen log, the lantern's light caught a faint glint on a nearby tree. Sabiné moved the lantern around the log until she was able to reproduce the effect, and identify the affected tree. Excitedly but carefully, she made her way around a small puddle of a pond to stand before a large oak tree. The warm lantern light showed clusters of glistening fungus on the tree's ancient trunk, contrasting with the dull matte of the bark. The clusters were similar to the fungus on the conifer, plated and brownish, but had the look of a spider's web covered in dew. Sabiné held the lantern closer to investigate. Again, she had no real way to tell how light brown these fungi were. According to her thumb, none of them seemed to be too big, either. She thought about comparing it to the other fungus, but decided she could do that back at the cabin. After all, her teacher hadn't seemed all that concerned about how many they needed. Sabiné grabbed a full cluster and deposited it in the basket, noting for a split second that it wasn't glistening due to moisture.

Readjusting her grip on the basket and lantern, she turned from the oak to make her way back to the log from earlier. Briefly, she stopped at the tiny pond, and noticed the reflection of a few stars in it's surface. Looking up, she recognized the three bright dots of Orion's Belt, and smiled to herself; it had always been the only constellation she could readily identify. As she got back to the log itself, she leaned against it and stopped to look back up at the stars, but by now Orion was obscured by the tangle of tall branches. Sabiné took it as a sign to keep moving.

As she moved further into the middle of the forest, Sabiné felt the air finally begin to cool. A sluggish breeze carrying the scent of pine moved her hair in front of her face, causing her to halt where she was. Carefully, she put down her basket to get a free hand and swept the strands out of her vision. 

"There we g-"

Her dialogue to no one was stopped when the breeze returned, this time placing her hair into her open mouth. Irritated, Sabiné quickly brushed her hair away, only to still feel it on her tongue. She spat, trying to get the one shed strand out, until she was fed up enough to just reach in and pluck it off her tongue and flick it away.

"Ugh."

Sabiné took a deep breath and continued on for a few hundred paces, until she was met with the trunk of a large pine. The pine seemed to have survived a fire, judging from the deep marks on it's trunk. Dotting the trunk however, were the several fans of plated fungi that Sabiné had stopped for. Holding up the lantern to study these new specimens, she thought they definitely looked light brown enough. Satisfied, she thumb-measured out a few and plucked them from the bark. 

No sooner than she had, a low rumble sounded off somewhere in the distance. Sabiné froze, trying to place the sudden unfamiliar sound in the throat of some familiar animal. There were no bears in this forest, she knew that for sure. As if to punctuate her thought, the growling rumble repeated, this time a bit louder than before. Sabiné suddenly decided she had gathered enough fungi, and should definitely return to the cabin.

Walking briskly through the passage of trees, she clutched the basket and lantern with an iron grip. Her heart almost echoed in her chest.

"This is stupid, its probably just a really loud frog or something."

Sabiné gripped her tools even tighter. Right as she came to a familiar clearing, she heard it again. She heard it, but this time, she could almost feel it. She was frozen. The volume of it reverberated through her very chest, as she felt her heart pound like it had never done before. Hot tears streamed down her face as she screamed into the inky woods.

"I'M NOT AFRAID OF YOU!"

This was it: she had to run, or die. Shaking, she heard her own foot snap a twig, and with that, it was like a beast itself was on her heels. Sabiné took off sprinting with the lantern and basket still in her hands. A stray branch caught on the handle of the basket, and yanked her back hard enough to stop her as it broke, the contents spilling all over. Sabiné got up in a flash and continued her flight, hands still gripping the basket and lantern. 

Finally, the lights of the cabin came into sight. Sabiné could have cried at the sight if she wasn't already. She clamored onto the porch and began to beat at the door, her breathing erratic as she tried to yell for her teacher. The door opened, and she was met with the shocked face of her teacher.

"Sabiné, what the hell happened to you?"

Sabiné ran inside, and pleaded with them between breaths.

"SHUT THE DOOR PLEASE, JUST SHUT THE DOOR, ITS AFTER ME,"

The mage shut the door, locked it at her instruction, and turned to face her.

"Sabiné, child, please calm down. Deep breaths, try to breathe."

Sabiné slowly laid down on the cabin floor, her breathing and heartbeat slowing returning to normal. Her teacher was crouched beside her, holding out a cup of water and looking extremely concerned.

"Sabiné, you look like you look like you fell out of a tree, my lantern is broken, and the handle is almost snapped off that basket! What happened?"

Sabiné looked at herself. Her shirt sleeve was torn, she was missing a shoe, she was covered in dirt, and she was still clutching the broken basket and now-extinguished lantern. She released her grip on her tools and sat up to take the cup, chugging it until empty.

"There was...some kind of ...beast..."

"A beast? In these woods?"

The mage stood up and put their hand to their chin, mulling Sabiné's statement over. Just as Sabiné began to get up from the floor, the rumbling growl filled her ears, inescapable and terrifyingly loud. She screamed. The mage yelled in surpise.

"AH, WHA- you scared me! Why are y- WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING?"

Sabiné, unable to hear her teacher over the now deafening roar, could only see their mouth moving.

"CAN'T YOU HEAR IT? ITS HERE, ITS RIGHT HERE!"

The mage winced at her volume, and then noticed the one lone fungus in the poor, battered basket. They looked around the room, and tore a bit of newspaper from the issue next to the door. Carefully, using the paper, they picked up the plate from the basket and examined it. Sabiné was still on the floor in tears, but fortunately could no longer hear the growl.

"Sabiné, did you pick this?"

She looked at the object in the mage's hand, blinking away the leftover tears. It was the glistening fungus from the oak tree, the dew-like dots now taking on a shade of pink in the light of the cabin. 

"I did..."

"Did you put it or your hands anywhere near your mouth, nose, or eyes?"

"No, I made sure I-"

Sabiné suddenly flashed back to the hair in her mouth and immediately made an ugly, breathy noise. Her teacher crouched back down next to her.

"You're having auditory hallucinations."

"Oh."

She looked around the room, anywhere but at the mage.

"Sorry."

"I'm...not sure why you're apologizing but, you didn't actually eat the mushroom itself, so the sounds should stop fairly soon."

Sabiné sat there, and began to cross her arms in embarrassment when she felt something poke her chest. She reached into her shirt and pulled the object out of her bra and into the open to examine it. It was a plate from the very first tree she stopped at, the orange-brown fungus that had spurred her further into the forest. Her teacher let out a short laugh.

"Well, you managed to get one after all! This is exactly what I needed, its called 'Chicken of the Forest'."

"Oh, well, what does it do?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like, magic-wise. What's it good for?"

"Its...good for soup..."

Sabiné's face fell. Her teacher bit their lips.

"So...this wasn't a magic thing?"

".....No."

"So I didn't have to specifically gather this at night?"

"............No."

Sabiné stood up, and walked out of the room, down the hall, and into her room without another word. The mage put their hand on their chin again, before standing up and coming to the hall.

"Sabiné, to be fair I never said this was a magic thing, I just wanted to make some soup. Some really good soup."

They didn't get a proper response, but instead just the muffled sound of loud growling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These chapters are just all the different Sabinés in different universes i guess? This one is slightly longer than the last i think.

**Author's Note:**

> First ACTUAL piece of writing in a while, so hopefully the next one will be longer.  
> Edit: Wasn't vibing with the name, she's Sabiné now.


End file.
